The massive, overwhelmingly Muslim migrant onslaught on Europe is the most important event of 2015.  Its proportions are staggering.  The Babylonian captivity affected at most 75,000 Jews, and the Völkerwanderung of the late-Roman era numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  It is greater, in numbers within the time frame, than the Moorish, Mongol, or Turkish invasions.  It is unprecedented.

Over a million unassimilable, generally unemployable, and often hostile aliens—coming from the greater Middle East and all over Africa—have joined the sprawling Islamic diaspora in the European Union.  That diaspora, now numbering over 20 million, has already created hundreds of exterritorial no-go areas—from Malmö in the north to Marseille in the south, from Bradford in the west to Berlin in the east.  In Europe, this is the first example of the state-within-a-state phenomenon since Cardinal Richelieu personally commanded the siege and subsequent destruction of the Huguenot redoubt at La Rochelle in 1628.

Last November the E.U. blithely predicted that three million more may arrive in the 28-nation bloc by the end of 2016.  Next spring, when sea crossing becomes relatively safe again, the invasion will resume—from Libya into Italy, from Turkey into Greece.  This is a process of metahistorical significance: The post-Christian liberal West, which has lost its sense of purpose and history, is unable to protect itself from those who are determined to conquer it.  They will continue coming for as long as they sense the civilizational weakness of the rich, pleasant lands in the crosshairs.  The lure has become irresistible, now that Europe is seen as the candy store with a busted lock.

In theory, European nations uniting to resist a common existential threat is the right model of strategic defense: A solid alliance is greater than the sum of its parts.  Polish King Jan Sobieski saved the day at the gates of Vienna in 1693, even though his realm was not directly threatened.  He knew that the crescent over St. Stephen’s would mean mortal peril for all Christians—Krakow included—and thus became the savior of Western civilization.

In practice, however, the institution known as the European Union is the greatest impediment to a coherent and effective plan of resistance.  Its unelected regulatory bureaucracy reflects an alliance of Cultural Marxists (to whom immigrants and deviants have replaced the proletariat as the vehicle of revolutionary transformation) and transnational capital.  The result is the dogma of multiculturalism, supported by the center-left and center-right alike.  It hinders defense and invites predators.

If no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—to keep the invaders out in the name of its own survival, the game is up.  Spengler heralded the problem 90 years ago with The Decline of the West.  He anticipated not a cataclysmic event but an extended decline.  It now appears that the period of gradual cultural and demographic decline is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.  The pre-E.U. Europe and the Muslim world could clearly define themselves vis-à-vis each other in a cultural and political sense.  What postmodernity and secularism have done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of the West, is to cast aside any idea of “our land,” of a space that is European in the ethnic, geographic, and cultural sense, a space that has an external boundary, a space that should be protected from those who covet it.

The West faces two clear alternatives: defense or eventual submission to a violent, emotionally stunted, culturally arid form of barbarity.  Europe stands to lose everything that makes civilized life worth living, from the Magna Carta to the grand cru, from Italian grand opera to prosciutto, from St. Peter’s in Rome to St. Paul’s in London.  The E.U. machine appears to be capable of stifling individual nations’ resistance, for now.  It marginalizes and demonizes those who resist.  The Brussels leviathan—and its gauleiters in the media and academe—are guilty of the greatest betrayal in human history.  They, too, will suffer the consequences in the fullness of time, if their scenario comes to fruition, because the invaders will not feel any debt of gratitude to the enablers.  By then it will be too late for the finest civilization the world has known.

In theory it would be in the American interest to use this country’s resources to bolster the defense of our enfeebled cousins across the pond, but it is difficult to envisage the scenario under which this could happen.  The rot is present on both sides of the Atlantic, reflecting our common civilizational genes.